#woes

I've tried talking it out to myself, I've tried writing out summaries of where I'd like to see it, but I haven't managed to find the way like that. It's not working and I'm stuck. And I just can't keep focus long enough by myself to actually think through the whole structure. So it's going very poorly. I mean, I made it through a 150,000-word novel and then 170,000 words into the sequel before I really got stuck, so it's not that it went entirely poorly, but. I am stuck.

So I guess I'm going to try to talk it through with myself at some point, and hope I actually have enough free time free of crises this week to actually do it. We'll see. But that's where that is.

I had toyed with making a Discord to talk about the work as I was working on it, because I'd been talking about it in a thread in a channel on an existing server but nobody on that server could actually manage to keep up. But the respondents to the survey on beta-reading were pretty mixed as to whether they'd use Discord at all, and I don't really have moderatorship in me, and also it felt extremely weird and egotistical to make a Discord server about solely my own fiction. It would make more sense to join a server that's about people writing their own fiction but then of course, I don't have time to read anyone else's fiction, so I would be entirely useless to anyone else, which is always what happens when I try to join writers' groups. Every writer just wants to talk about their own OCs, which is natural and understandable, but oh my god I don't have time or attention for anyone else's OCs because it turns out mine are a lot of work. And then it feels just really gross and conceited to be like no, everyone talk about my OC's. Because it's not actually that they're my comfort characters or whatever, not that there's anything wrong with show and tell of comfort characters but that's not what I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to make them interesting because I need to hang the scaffolding of this plot on them... but... anyway it just feels icky and also ineffective to be like "please come talk to me about my blorbos, Guy Who Makes Plot Go and Girl Who Makes Plot Go and Guy Who They Both Like To Make Out With Who I Can Hang Plot Twists On, and how I could more effectively torture them for fun and profit".

anyway. I don't know how to talk about things. i can't outline for shit. Most of what happens when I talk through plot points is that I realize that the thing I'd been idly assuming would happen can't actually work, and the harder a commenter argues that it should, the more convinced I become that it can't. But I need that. So I have to figure out how to do that for myself because I really can't figure out how to connect to anyone else who can do that for me.

Mostly that's looked like writing tens of thousands of words of backstory, so far. I keep toying with putting some of that on AO3, because most of it's too long to put on Tumblr, but IDK. IDK what it would look like or how it would go together or what. And I just don't know how to talk about it.

Man sometimes I really fuckin' miss Livejournal, you know?? But I've tried using Dreamwidth for that-- for this novel, in fact, years ago, no less-- and it doesn't work. No platform works for communication if you're just talking to yourself. So.

C'est la vie, c'est our extremely lonely internet age where the means of communication are all optimized to extract value from us instead of letting us talk to each other. IDK i got no answers.